The holiday season is supposed to be a time of comfort and joy. Yet, for many people it can also be a time of great stress. Employees have to juggle their professional duties with personal demands, such as shopping for gifts, hosting and attending holiday parties, cleaning and cooking.

To-Do lists should be an invaluable part of any small business person’s day-to-day. They don’t just help you get things down, they help keep you motivated and on track. Now, they seem pretty self-explanatory, right? Write down a task. Then do it. But sometimes they can quickly go from being useful to useless. A to-do list can too easily take a wrong turn and become exhaustive and exhausting. Here are five quick tips to help you get the most from your to-do lists.

You’ve built your team. You want to keep them motivated. Most importantly, you want to keep them productive. Thank goodness it’s the 21st century, because there are technologies available right now that allow your team members to do their jobs wherever they are.

If there’s one thing that binds business owners and their employees together, it’s a mutual disdain for the employee performance evaluation. Though they may have different reasons for disliking this annual rite of professional life, it’s unlikely anyone would be upset if it were to suddenly go away.

Crises are inevitable for any small business. There’s going to come a time where something will go wrong – whether because of you, an employee , or something completely out of your control. How you deal with that crisis can have a negative impact on your company. We want to make sure that doesn’t happen, so we spoke with Taylor Griffith, Owner of Alpha Art, to collect a few key pointers on how not to manage a crisis and how to help you get through one successfully.

It’s never been easier to start a small business than it is right now. Interest rates are low. Consumer confidence is up. A new wave of technology is making sophisticated software easy to use and readily available. Almost anyone can start up a side project or full-fledged corporation more easily than ever before.